Que linda es la vida: Look at all the costumes!

"Wipe your hands on your costume, and bend forward to pick up your foot."

The costume concept has really been with me lately. In the hot room these past few days, it's like I hardly know myself; some days I'm a rockstar from another planet, others I'm a mouse huddled in the corner, toying quietly with my water bottle as the rest of the class launches themselves into Balancing Stick.

I gotta say, I love the variation. During the semester, I often feel like a woman who only has two or three outfits: Teacher! Colleague! Exhausted person desperately trying to make the most out of a few ounces of spare time! But during the summer, ay. Que linda es la vida. I feel like a spoiled princess who gets to try on a thousand dresses, reveling in the different fabric, texture, and colors of each, knowing there's nothing stopping me from wearing what looks good that day.

(Case in point: I just wrote an extended analogy about wearing fancy dresses. If you know me in person, you know I'm the girl who thinks that wearing a bra makes her suitable to go out in public. This girly-girl post is a summer special, folks.)

It's when I have the time to play with all the different costumes in my closet that I feel most like myself. Maybe that's just the way life is: we go through phases--new mommy, cashier, invalid, writer, mountain climber, liquid eyeliner-wearer, thrift store-hunter--and some of those outfits are like uniforms we're forced to wear for a while. Though some outfits are given away, some are mainstays that will haunt the closet for a long time. 

I know I've been referring to a lot of super-smart spiritual teachers lately, but the person that kept coming to mind as I toss this post around is Tori Amos. (Please, please, bear with me ;-) She did an album a few years ago called American Doll Posse. The unifying concept of the album--God, do her recent albums have unifying concepts--is that the songs are sung from the point of view of Greek goddesses: Demeter, Athena, and all those other righteous chicas I never took the time to learn about. While the album isn't quite as "solid" musically as some of her earlier stuff, I think that idea is kinda cool.

“It’s not just, ‘I’m going to wake up and play dress-up today,’" Tori Amos says about the point-of-view thing. "What I'm trying to tell other women is they have their own version of the compartmentalised feminine which may have been repressed in each one of them. For many years I have been an image; that isn’t necessarily who I am completely. . . I think these women are showing me that I have not explored honest extensions of the self."

Yes, I just quoted someone talking about the "compartmentalized feminine." But it's summer, and I'm gonna say it: hell yeah, girl. We all have warriors, dainty doilies, surfer dudes, broken hearts, sneaky wits, and sensual lovers inside us. (And if ya think about it from a cosmic, multiple-life perspective, that concept becomes even more interesting.)

So go on. Look in your closet. Which one you gonna put on today?

And enjoy my fave song from ADP :-)


"Is there a love lost and found?"

"Keeps perfectly still"

Bikram yoga. It's the same thing everywhere, right? What crazy person would want to take the same class, over and over? And to hear the teacher say the same words every time? We must be out of our minds.

Maybe not.

It was The Dancing J who published a really cool post recently that reminded me of a song I used to listen to all the time. In this blog, I've mentioned that I'm a teacher. I also indicated, I think, that I used to have some anxiety issues.  Before I would teach a class, I used to be wound up like an E on the first string. I'd sit in my office, lesson plans in order. I was technically ready to go, but for those fifteen minutes or so before class started I would get nervous and couldn't concentrate on anything. I'd sorta hop around, thinking about this possibility and that, and as a result it would take a few minutes at the beginning of class to really settle in and connect with the students.

The best way to be really prepared for anything, of course, is to find a way to get into the moment. What did the trick for me was hearing Tori Amos's "Horses." (If you hate Tori Amos, just roll with me a minute anyway. I promise it'll all come together. ;-)

Before every class, I'd sit down at the computer, go to the Blip.fm file I'd bookmarked, and just listen. That song came out in 1997, so I already knew it inside and out--where the breaths were taken, which syllables were drawn out, and which notes were emphasized on the keyboard. To be perfectly honest, the song is not the most sonically interesting of stuff that's out there. It's repetitive. It's meditative. The melody doesn't develop into a typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus the way most songs do. But there was something in that song that spoke to me, so I'd listen to it anyway. I'd listen closely to the notes I'd memorized, letting myself get hypnotized, every single day, before each class. The anxiety about class starting would quietly drop away and by the end of Tori's final repetition of "keeps perfectly still," I would be absolutely in the moment. I'd be truly ready for class. 

Isn't that what yoga does? Doesn't it get you ready for life? You go to a Bikram class, and what some might think of as a curse ("it's the same thing every day!") is really a blessing. To do the yoga you have to meditate on what's happening. 

After a few months, regular practitioners know the sequence. We "know the words." But we can't know what's actually coming in our practice, right? Despite the repetition of the dialogue and postures, there's a spontaneity in what actually happens in the yoga room. We never know what the body will tell us, what we'll be capable of, when a line of dialogue will speak to us in a new way--or when we might unexpectedly fall flat into a puddle of our own sweat.

Perhaps because it's "the same thing over and over," you have to keep your mind perfectly still. And being present in the practice leads to being more present in life. Can't get much more prepared than that!
ॐ

Check out a pretty good version of "Horses" here. If you don't hate Tori, that is :-)